


Call Me Icarus

by marigold_bumblebee



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abusive Dursley Family (Harry Potter), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Child Neglect, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Introspection, Obscurial Harry Potter, Obscurus (Harry Potter), Pre-Canon, Pre-Hogwarts, Vignette, What-If, dudley is an okay kid with bad parents, harry is small and deserves more than this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:07:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26924104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marigold_bumblebee/pseuds/marigold_bumblebee
Summary: Harry is a Bad child, and that is why he does bad things.He will just have to try harder to be good.(The repression of magic is a terrible thing.)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 332





	Call Me Icarus

**Author's Note:**

> wow isn't it so crazy that the harry potter series just doesn't have a known author  
> makes writing fanfic kinda weird, haha  
> for all you know I could be the author and this is actually canon wow life is such a mystery and a conundrum

.

It’s Sunday. 

It’s Sunday, June 22, 1986, and today is a Very Important day because today is Dudley’s sixth birthday party. 

It isn’t really his birthday. His birthday isn’t really until tomorrow, but Aunt Petunia went ahead and threw the party today, because Dudley starts Junior League Rugby on Monday and he won’t have any time for a proper party. 

He and Dudley wait out in the yard, on folding chairs tucked up under carefully set out card tables. They sit outside like that, the paper tablecloths Dudley picked out at the store fluttering in the summer breeze, for nigh on an hour before Aunt Petunia acknowledges that no guests are going to arrive. 

It’s a real shame, because Harry had worked awfully hard on putting the invitations into the right envelopes and licking all the stamps so Aunt Petunia could mail them. 

Dudley doesn’t seem to mind, though. He plows right ahead, ripping open all the presents his parents bought for him. He smiles blithely through their laughter and applause, Harry’s shy and uncertain and Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon’s an enthusiastic roar. 

It’s all going rather well, until Uncle Vernon opens his mouth and says something he really shouldn’t have. 

“Well now, son,” Uncle Vernon says once Dudley has opened his final present for the afternoon. It’s an action figure with an arm that moves when you press a trigger on the back, and Dudley is having great fun making it hit its small fist against the table. “Haven’t you had such a lovely birthday so far? You didn’t even _miss_ Piers Polkiss.” 

Dudley’s playing falters. 

Harry can feel the tantrum building, like mediums can sense spirits and cats can smell storms. It’s in the flush that comes over his cousin’s chubby face, the way his legs abruptly cease swinging. 

Aunt Petunia can feel it too, if the nervous smile tugging at her mouth is anything to go by. 

“Now, Diddykins,” she soothes, clutching vainly at her son’s fat little hands. “I’m sure the Polkisses would have loved to come to your party.” 

Dudley’s face turns red. Squinches up like it always does when he’s gonna cry. 

Harry feels his own skin crawling in turn, his fists clenching, stubby nails biting at his palms. 

Dudley stands up from his chair, stomps over to one of the tables across the yard, and pushes his rugby themed cake off its platter onto the ground. 

_Oh, please, don’t._

Chunks of chocolate cake spatter over the tops of his shoes and he bursts into tears. 

His sobs are gasping, violent. He’s choking on air and saltwater and Harry always has hated when Dudley cries. 

_Now look what you’ve done._

Dudley only gets louder when Uncle Vernon waddles over to him, fumbling over apologies and soothing little nothing-words. 

“Hush now, Dudders, look, we’ll buy you another cake, we’ll buy you another action figure, too, if you like.”

No one knows Dudley like Harry does. Nobody else has sat quietly off to the side and just _observed._ Dudley wants Piers Polkiss, Dudley doesn’t want another action figure. 

In fact, he’s got his first action figure clutched in his hands and is slowly working on bending the miniature plastic arm so far back it snaps clean in two. 

The crack it makes as it breaks is very satisfying, Harry thinks. Dudley thinks so too, he can tell from the way his cousin’s wails begin to quiet. He even smiles a little: a careless, wicked thing that has Harry smiling right back.

If he looks close enough, Harry can see where Uncle Vernon’s hands are shaking. His face is scarlet and perspiring. It’s an ugly, raw red, like the bacon before Harry cooks it in the mornings. 

“Now, don’t do that son, that cost a quarter of your daddy’s paycheck—” Dudley starts back up again, sobbing. 

Dudley’s eyes are brown and watery like a calf’s and Harry knows that he would do anything to make him smile again. He’s rather like his aunt, that way. 

Uncle Vernon’s arm starts to bend back like the arm off Dudley’s toy. He looks down, startled. Harry looks on in anticipation. He can taste it on his tongue, this little spark of excitement. 

Storms churning eagerly on beneath his skin. Something impossibly bright and electric welling up in him. 

Uncle Vernon’s arm snaps back all in one go and Aunt Petunia starts to scream. 

Dudley laughs. 

Harry laughs too, silently and to himself. 

.

Harry is seven years old when it really clicks in him that he does not look like Dudley or Aunt Petunia, the both of them pink and blond and soft around the edges. 

He’s bony and sharp. All hard, jagged angles like broken vases and lightning bolt scars. 

Dudley must realize it at around the same time, because he begins to ask Harry questions. 

“How come you live with us instead of with your real Mum and Da’?” 

He’s got himself propped lazily against the windowsill, his body inside and his head poking through the window to where Harry’s weeding the flowerbeds. His shadow looms ominously over the rose bushes. The pose makes him look rather like an obese bird of prey, but Harry refrains from telling him so. 

“I dunno. Auntie says it’s ‘cause they’re dead.” 

This is a subject Harry does not like to discuss. 

“Oh really? How’d it happen? Were they murdered, like on the telly?” 

There are times when being a Potter instead of a Dursley is more than Harry could ever hope to bear. Some secret buried deep in his bones. A fire lit in his blood and carefully smothered out. 

“Did the police find them all cut up in a bathtub? That happened to one lady in Manchester, you know. They found her all in little pieces—”

Harry’s breathing goes a little wrong. There’s a funny tightness in his chest, choking.

“No. Auntie says they got awful drunk and drove themselves off a cliff.” 

“Wicked.” 

On the television inside, _The Wizard of Oz_ comes on and Aunt Petunia turns it off before it can get more than two minutes in. 

. 

Dudley has a book that Aunt Marge gave him forever ago all about the different types of flowers. It lists out their names and what they mean all in nice little alphabetized rows with colour pictures next to each definition. It came as part of a box set, along with a book about dog breeds and one about different species of trees. 

Uncle Vernon had thrown quite a fit about it, insisting that Dudley ought to have books about cars (like a healthy boy) and heavy machinery (like a good Dursley). Aunt Marge had thrown her own fit right back, though, and she’s rather a lot scarier, so Dudley kept the books. 

The flower one is the one Harry’s reading now. 

He’s snuck away with it out of Dudley’s room. He knows Dudley won’t miss it; some days he wonders if Dudley even _can_ read. Harry’s gotten good at sneaking around and these days he devours books like the table scraps he’s fed for breakfast. 

On page 52, there’s a whole collection of different flowers all with a common word in their name. _Lily._

That was the name of Harry’s mum.

She must have been horribly important, to have a whole page’s worth of flowers named after her. 

It makes him smile to think about. 

Every time his mum comes up in conversation, his aunt’s face gets all pinched and angry and her voice goes all shrill when she yells at him to go to his cupboard and stop asking idiotic questions. 

It’s nice to finally have something positive to associate with his late mother. 

On page 58, there’s a picture of a magenta, five-petaled flower called a Petunia. 

There’s only one, and it looks very common. 

In fact, Harry is almost certain that there are Petunias in every garden on Privet Drive, all of them long-necked and pink.

He gets in trouble later that night when his aunt finds the book tucked under his blankets, and he decides maybe she is not so common after all when she leaves a red imprint of her hand on his cheek. 

“I’ll not have you stealing from my son in my own home like a street rat,” she says as she leaves. The cupboard locks shut behind her and Harry cradles his stinging cheek in her wake. 

.

Harry is slow. 

_Underdeveloped,_ a school nurse had told him once, not unkindly, not knowing of the death sentence she was giving him. _Some things might be a bit harder for you than other children because you haven’t yet grown like you should._

Harry is slow and he got locked in his cupboard for three straight days for making enough of a fuss to have to go to the nurse in the first place, with an extra two days for receiving such an embarrassing diagnosis. 

He’s not slow the way Dudley is, either. Harry wishes dearly he was like Dudley; even if he had to do like Dudley and take extra lessons after school and get test grades that make Aunt Petunia’s face go tight and worried. 

No, Harry’s slow in a way that is all his own. 

The kind of slow where you have to do what Uncle Vernon calls “learning the hard way”— a knock around the head for burning toast, a hand at the back of his neck for talking back. Not choking, just resting there. Like a snake coiled and ready to strike, only scarier because Harry can talk to snakes but he has never really been able to talk to Uncle Vernon. 

He can never learn fast enough, can never work hard enough. 

He’s young but he feels so old already. His bones creak when he walks like the stairs above his cupboard and he _aches_ , constantly and all over. 

“Your Aunt’s garden isn’t going to weed itself, is it, boy?” 

Harry sighs and picks his trowel back up from where it had been lying on the ground. He’d been taking a short break before Uncle Vernon came home from work, in a poor mood judging from the heavy scowl marring his face. 

“No, Uncle.” 

The popping of his joints as he digs up the weeds is so loud that he wants to bury his head in the dirt just to block out the noise. 

“What’s your problem?” Dudley grunts, taking up his usual post at the windowsill once his father stomps away. 

He’s very quiet still: even if Uncle Vernon has left the vicinity, he has surprisingly good hearing and does not tolerate Dudley’s interactions with Harry. 

_I’m dying,_ Harry thinks but does not say. 

“It’s too hot.” 

Dudley’s responding eye roll could be seen from the moon. “Yeah, no shit.” 

Shit is a word Dudley is not allowed to say, but that he says anyway. This is because when he does things he is not supposed to, Dudley still gets to eat and sleep in a bed like a Respectable Young Man. Harry does not, and this is why he has never said a curse word in his life, not even when he’s alone. 

“Just shut up and weed Mum’s garden, yeah? Don’t go looking for trouble, today.” 

Harry blinks a couple of times and tries to recall a time when he has ever wanted trouble enough to go looking for it. 

“Yeah, of course,” he says, and spears his trowel into the soil. 

_Maybe I’ve been dying all my life,_ Harry thinks, keeping the thought very, very quiet just in case Uncle Vernon can hear it from inside. 

. 

Maybe it is important to note that when Petunia Dursley née Evans found the baby waiting for her on her doorstep, it was because she had nearly trod on it when she was reaching for the morning paper. 

She had been holding a bottle of milk at the time, and the bottle dropped to the ground, shattering into a hundred pieces and spilling milk all across the pavement. 

Perhaps that was what started the resentment: that initial humiliation Harry caused without even meaning to, the shame of a housewife having to mop spilt milk from her own doorstep while her neighbors looked on and whispered to one another in gossiping delight. 

Maybe it is important to note that the first time one-year-old Harry peered up at Petunia Dursley with her sister’s eyes and called her _Mama_ , she pinched him so hard her fingernails nearly met in the flesh of his cheek, leaving crescent shaped marks in the skin deep enough to draw blood. 

Her stomach had turned over and over on itself and she spent that night locked in the bathroom, crying and retching over the toilet well into the small hours of the morning. Dudley had wailed and Vernon had knocked on the bathroom door, but Petunia ignored them both. It was so profoundly _unfair_ , the exchange of her sister’s life for the life of this child who would never know her. 

She can still remember the anger that had risen up in her, as petty and spiteful as a teenage girl’s. How Lily must have hated her, to be willing to break her heart like this so many times over. She remembers the babies’ cries ringing from down the hall.

Remembers begging her sister’s ghost, _why, oh why would you give him to me? Haven’t you hurt me enough?_

Once, when Harry had been newly four years old and about to start school, Petunia took both of the children on a walk in the park, keeping him a careful five steps behind Dudley at all times while she held her son’s hand and pretended that Harry was not there at all. She would’ve kept him at home, but Vernon was at work and Dudley had thrown a great fit and Petunia at that time could not stomach the thought of a toddler left alone in her clean house. 

While they were walking, they stumbled upon a little bird. A young warbler with its neck broken from trying to leave its mother’s nest before it was ready. Dudley had laughed and Harry had _smiled_ at her son, this wry, indulgent expression that set Petunia’s teeth on edge. 

The hairs on Petunia’s arms had stood briefly on end, and then, with a tiny but somehow stomach-churning _crack,_ the warbler’s body separated cleanly from its head, leaving the little creature in two pieces spread out across the grass. 

Her precious, darling boy roared with laughter and Harry looked on with that same expression: the quiet pride a parent wears in the face of pleasing their child. 

This is the first time Petunia looks at her nephew and really means it when she thinks _freak._

Maybe it is important that the cupboard that Harry lives in has exactly three locks on it. A chain lock, a padlock, and a deadbolt. _He’s just a boy,_ Vernon says to her once regarding the locks. How can you condemn the child, whose only sin is being born? All Petunia can do is laugh, shrill enough to make him take it back. 

Consider this:

The walls Petunia builds to protect her family will never be high enough to satisfy her. 

.

Harry is ten years old and Dudley has just punched him in the face. 

He’s hit Harry before, obviously, but never in the face, and never with any real force behind it. 

Harry is unsure of what he’s done wrong, and that is a hurt in and of itself, when he used to know Dudley better than anyone else. When he used to be able to read all of Dudley’s wants from his face as easily as looking at a picture book. It’s a been a long while since then, he supposes. 

Perhaps it’s not a matter of doing something wrong. Maybe it’s like how it is with his aunt and uncle, where he doesn’t have to purposefully misbehave to be punished. Harry is just Bad by birth and it’s in his nature to cause trouble even when he doesn’t mean to. 

“Go away,” Dudley says, his jaw clenched even as his lower lip starts to tremble. “Nobody wants you here.” Piers Polkiss and another boy that Harry doesn’t know are standing at either side of him, leering down at Harry. 

They are very tall. Easily taller than Harry. Most people are, so this is not much of a surprise. 

“Freak,” Dudley spits, and turns away, his friends trailing loyally after him. Piers keeps turning back to smirk at Harry with his pointy rat-shaped face, and Harry thinks it would’ve been much more satisfying to watch Dudley punch _him_ instead. 

Harry is left alone on the ground by the swingset, quietly bewildered, feeling something in his stomach twist unpleasantly. 

It’s easy to make fun of him, he knows. Aunt Petunia gave him a stupid looking haircut last week and all of his jumpers are big enough to swallow him whole. He has skinny, knobbly legs and his fingernails are always chewed down to the quick, and he _knows_ that he is an easy target. 

A bruise is beginning to blossom under his left eye, he can feel it. His cheekbone throbs painfully and he feels sick to his stomach. 

“I thought we were—” Harry murmurs, staring at Dudley’s back in the distance. _Friends_ isn’t the right word, and neither is _acquaintances_. _Cousins_ doesn’t express what Harry really means, and in the end all he can think of is _on the same side._

Because they are, aren’t they? 

When Uncle Vernon yells at Dudley for failing an assignment, Harry is the one to tell him that he’s not stupid, that everyone’s good at something even if it’s not homework and Uncle Vernon doesn’t know what he’s talking about. 

When Aunt Petunia locks Harry in the cupboard at night without food, Dudley will sneak him digestive biscuits through the crack under the door, always taking half of the pack for himself, of course. “I’m so hungry,” Dudley says every time, his back up against the door and his mouth full of biscuit. “I can’t imagine how you must feel.” 

Harry walks back to Privet Drive alone, the wind cold across his shoulders. 

It’s not the season for gardening so he spends his afternoon mopping the house, on his hands and knees scrubbing at the hardwood floors until they gleam. 

“It’s nothing you did,” Dudley says quietly, head down, the toe of one muddy trainer already making a mark on Harry’s impeccably clean floors. “The guys, they just like doing stuff like that, you know? It’s like boxing, you know, like on TV.” 

Harry nods and keeps scrubbing. 

He knows. He is an easy target. 

There’s relief in Dudley’s voice when he says, _“Great._ I’m glad you get it. Hey, Mum said to make sure and get the moulding. You missed it last time and she doesn’t want it to look sloppy.” 

Harry feels it now, that _wrongness_ inside of him. Those sick, empty spaces inside where soul should meet body and there is instead a dark and endless cavern. He can’t understand it, but he knows that something is broken, that some pieces of him don’t fit together quite right. It’s like Aunt Petunia says. He’s Bad to the core of himself, all twisted up and ruined. 

“I’ll try to remember,” he says, pushing down the ugly Something that wants to burst from his chest.

(Piers Polkiss is sitting in his living room half a block down the road when suddenly his nose gives a painful _crack_ and starts gushing blood. His mother, once she’s gotten ahold of herself, tilts his head back to stop the bleeding, but it’s clear her son’s nose is broken. 

Shattered, really.

Like someone’s reared back and punched him straight in his little rat face.) 

. 

Harry turns eleven years old and there are no letters that pour in through the mail slot, and no owls that come pounding into the windows. No envelopes fly in through the chimney, and certainly no half-giants make him any chocolate birthday cakes. 

His birthday is a quiet affair largely because everyone has forgotten it, and he spends it drinking tea at Mrs. Figg’s house down the road. 

He’s curled up in one of her squashy armchairs, a small floral teacup clutched in his hands. It’s warm between his palms, a fragrant curl of steam rising off of it. 

“Eleven, you say?” Mrs. Figg asks, squinting at him like she’s trying to catch him in a fib. 

Harry nods and takes a sip of his tea. It is not very good. “As of today,” he says. 

Mrs. Figg leans back in her chair, frowning heavily. “And you didn’t receive any mail? Nothing unusual happened today at all?” 

Harry shrugs. “I never get any mail.” And nothing unusual ever happens to him, either. This is because it is very important that Harry is things like _normal_ and _well to do._

This is the wrong thing to say, apparently. Mrs. Figg’s frown deepens, a crease forming between her brows. “This won’t do at all,” she says, standing up and stalking towards her kitchen table. “No letters for _Harry Potter,”_ she grumbles loudly as she shuffles through a stack of papers. “Harry _bloody_ Potter!” 

Harry is a little touched that she cares this much about him receiving birthday cards, but mostly, he is very confused. His aunt would be upset if she heard Mrs. Figg swearing in front of him. The thought of it makes him uncomfortable. 

“Batty old man.” She’s grabbed a pen now and is furiously writing something on a piece of paper that looks like it’s from the 18th century for how yellowed and wrinkled it is. She keeps muttering things under her breath that do not sound nice. 

Harry decides to mind his own business and finish his cup of tea. It’s not long now until the Dursleys will want him to come home and start making their lunch, anyway. 

There’s a fat cat with a grouchy looking face hiding under Mrs. Figg’s chair. Harry has always wanted to pet it, because its fur is white and long and looks very soft, but every time he comes over the cat hides and does not come out. 

He wonders if it was something he did.

. 

There is a batty old man who ends up receiving Arabella Figg’s letter, scribbled angrily in ballpoint pen, and he too frowns over the situation most gravely. 

“Fawkes, my dear friend,” he says, and the bird trills in answer. “It seems we have found ourselves in quite the dilemma, indeed.” 

He takes a lemon drop from the glass bowl on his desk, but the sweetness of it does not ease the disquiet in his heart. 

In the corner, the bird burns itself to cinders and starts again.

. 

Harry has bruises. 

They’re trifling little things really, studded across his shoulders in the oblong shapes of his uncle’s fingers, pressed against his wrist bone in the shape of his aunt’s thumb. 

It’s nothing like on television— women and children with tiger stripes on their arms and hips and choked across their necks, all of them sickly pale with bruises purple-black.

All of Harry’s fade within two days and go that funny shade of green, like acid and eyes and garden snakes, like half-remembered flashes of light. 

He is eleven years and two weeks old and he forgets what it is he’s done exactly, but it must’ve been something really awful because Uncle Vernon is absolutely _purple_ with rage, his breath coming out in hard, wet puffs like a seething bull. 

“Come here, boy,” he says with some effort, struggling to get the words out from behind gritted teeth. 

_Boy._ This is what they call him. He is not _Harry_ , he is _boy,_ and _freak,_ and _don’t touch that_ and _would you just be quiet._

Harry approaches his uncle, his head dropped low. There’s that same feeling in his chest that he always gets in situations like these: that sickness, that death-feeling that he can’t quite shake. All the hollow places within him, all the gaps he can’t fill, how they suffocate him. 

Uncle Vernon raises his hand and brings it down across Harry’s face with more force than Harry is expecting. 

Something _really_ awful, then. 

His class ring is flipped around wrong and the gem on it breaks the skin on Harry’s lower lip. He can taste blood, the familiar copper coin flavor of it that makes his stomach turn. 

There is a ringing in his ears and so it takes him a moment to realize that Aunt Petunia is screaming. 

She hates the sight of blood like no other. When Dudley was small and he used to come home with his hands full of grimy little dead things, the way children and housecats often do, he would try to give them to her and she would always scream loudly enough to spook the neighbors. Dudley thought that this was monstrously funny, obviously, and did it all the more often just to watch his mother’s face go pale and frightened. 

She looks very pale and frightened right now. There are tears gathering at the corners of her watery blue eyes. 

Harry has always hated when people cry. 

_“What have you done?”_ He hears her shriek. 

Everything feels like it is happening to someone else, or maybe like it’s happening to him but he is too far away to know.

 _“He can’t go to school like this! Look at him! T-They’ll think we— that we’re_ doing _things to him, Vernon, oh, God—”_

Harry wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and it comes back slick with blood, much more than he had previously suspected. 

He wants his aunt to stop crying. It’s this horrible, grating sound. It catches on his nerves wrong, crushes in his diaphragm. Eats him alive. 

He wants everything to Stop and Be Quiet and Go Away. Harry wants to curl up very small and pretend that he does not exist. He wants to peel his skin away and become nothing, become less than nothing, tear the bad parts from himself until there isn’t anything left at all. 

Harry looks up. 

He is shaking. 

He meets eyes with Dudley across the kitchen. They are still a calf’s eyes, huge and dark and tearful. 

_Stop it,_ he thinks, and feels it with his whole body. _Shut up. You’re making him cry._

Harry’s fist clenches and suddenly he is not small. He is not slow. Suddenly he is immense, he is _Everywhere_ and _Nowhere_ and 

And Aunt Petunia stops crying. Uncle Vernon stops shouting. Dudley’s eyes are dry and empty. The house on Privet Drive is very quiet, indeed. 

The pressure in Harry’s chest settles, satisfied. 

.

**Author's Note:**

> everyone make sure to go drink some water ok I know you don't take care of yourself  
> do better  
> you deserve better


End file.
